Renewal
by Animako
Summary: Yuna disappears overnight, Tidus with her. Fiends swarm Besaid village, and the door to the Cloister of Trials locks itself. Rikku's worried.


When Yuna goes missing with together with Tidus and glass spreads in a glaze over the dead fayth stones and doors slam down, glyph-locked, in the temple, when hungry monsters begin to prowl the village, Rikku's the one who squares her shoulders and decides she'll hunt down the cause of it all.

She didn't mean to take this responsibility on, but Lulu and Wakka don't want to go looking for solutions, they have places in their community. The villagers who can fight have rallied at the borders, and Wakka's first among them. Lulu's applying common sense by brute force to the panicking population, calming people and organising them. They're holding the borders, on the defensive, and no other islanders have the confidence to walk into a Cloister of Trials, least of all the old priests who look up at the heavy shut door at the top of the ornamented staircase with awe. The temples haven't been revered as Yevon's gift for some time, but their role in the High Summoner's victory hasn't been forgotten; now, magically shut to outsiders, they've become something revered but real and all too intimidating.

Rikku had lived through that long dangerous journey that's already turning into a myth, and if the temples once scared an Al Bhed pagan, they don't any more.

Paine comes with her, of course, but it's her, Rikku, (ex-)Guardian to the High Summoner, who goes first. The Trials have reset themselves and Paine is too lazily cynical and not practised enough to to take the lead in locking spheres into their right places. Rikku feels a kind of strange nostalgia as she makes her way through the lamp-lit corridors, she's wondering about whether the Fayth or the Farplane is behind this resurrection of the Cloisters (once more, passageways are bright with a flickering glow that seems familiar and unthreatening). There are no fiends in here; maybe the doors shut because things are back to how they should be, maybe the passage to the underworld is now shut to all except the dead. Maybe the rush of fiend attacks was a... fluke. Or a one-off and everything is going to go back to normal tomorrow.

There's a faintest hint of a rhythm in her ears, though. The sound is the song, the Hymn, the Fayth-melody. It gets louder throughout Rikku's slapdash solving of the Trial, until it's not just a ghostly imaginary echo, it's the sound of something distant but real.

The Fayth were Sent, though. Hearing the song, Rikku feels deeply uneasy. Things have changed here and that thought, that uncertainty, grows in the blonde Al Bhed's mind.

When Rikku's about to step up onto the lift that leads to the antechamber, Paine raises an eyebrow. It's a sign she wants to talk, or wants Rikku to shut up stop think and listen. She's been happy to trail behind the Al Bhed so far, but Rikku doesn't normally move so determinedly towards a goal. Rikku normally speculates and bounces and questions, having to be shepherded along the mission. Paine wants to know what's motivating the thief.

"Rikku. You think Yuna came here?"

Rikku doesn't know. Five months ago, Yuna and Tidus came back from their honeymoon across Spira, radiant and happy, for the fourth annual celebration of the Eternal Calm. They'd bounced straight back off to Luca, filled with plans of establishing Blitz teams and youth governments. But then... when they came and picked up Rikku and Paine from ReHome, two days ago, something had been wrong.

Yuna had been drawn and pensive in a way she hadn't been since the pilgrimage. Tidus hadn't been meeting anyone's eyes.

"Yeah." Rikku said, staring at a spot on the lift ahead of them. She hugged herself. "I think she was keeping a secret from us, you know?"

Paine took a step closer to her friend. She could see now - Rikku looked scared.

"Still!" Rikku said, turning and putting a grin on her face. "We'll just take a look here. At the least, we can see whether it's the Farplane making the fiends play up like this."

Paine tilts her head. "The Cloister of Trials was_ dead _before now. The Farplane wouldn't fix that."

Rikku shook her head and stepped onto the lift.

* * *

They rise up in silence; in the antechamber, torches bring a room full of statues to life. The door to the Fayth is intact: like every other door here, it's now shut.

Rikku steps off the lift ahead of her fellow Gullwing; Paine's staying behind her and to the side, and without looking, Rikku can tell her friend's got her hand on her sword, on guard. For all the Al Bhed thought the villagers were being silly and superstitious about the temple, she's not comfortable in this room either. The temples always seemed to have their own kind of innate intelligence, what with the trials and magic-lights and glyphs and lifts that move without orders. In this room it seems even stronger – as if she's being watched.

It could just be the décor - the dignified statues and old architecture are intimidating to an Al Bhed mind. Not in a we're-Yevonites-you're-not way, not because of racism or class, but because this is as ancient as salvaged machina and just as clever and beautiful.

Everything leads your eye to the ornate Fayth-door. This is the culmination of a Summoner's visit, the main purpose and utmost challenge that the Temple offers.

It's not really right, being here, making her way through a trial designed for Yevon's sacrifices. No monsters have been trespassing, there aren't any treasure chests to loot. It's the same kind of _wrong_ as the tourism at Zanarkand, but while that at least blanked out the horror of centuries of death and decay, this seems pointless and disrespectful to all those dedicated (dead) summoners. There's nothing that she can do or see or fix. She isn't a journeying summoner, she hasn't got a noble goal.

Suddenly the temple seems quiet. Almost accusing.

"Let's look around, then!" She says to Paine, wanting to hear the other girl's voice.

Paine gives her a long, blank look but then nods. Rikku bites back a complaint about her friend's stoicism, turning to scan the room. Nothing looks out of place at all. It's as if fiends never ransacked the place, back during the Vegnagun thing.

Paine wanders the edges of the chamber, inspecting statues without great interest.

Rikku looks around but fidgets and sighs. It's the Chamber of the Fayth they need to see.

She pushes a mass of hair out of her face. Cracks her knuckles. Walks up to the door.

It opens of its own accord, ornate door rising and white fans of petals drawing back .

* * *

She goes there, not without trepidation.

There's a crystal glaze across the hole that led to the Farplane, and Rikku moves closer to see it. Cloudy colours and the grey of the Fayth-stone are visible through the glass-shine, like looking into deep clear water. The door pulls itself shut behind her, and she realises it shut Paine out.

Rikku tells herself to let go of the handles of her knives. She looks up, sees pyreflies dancing.

The room's alive in a way it hasn't been before. Brighter. The temple is back. The hole to the Farplane is sealed – that's a good thing, right?

If the temple's back... Rikku crouches beside the Fayth-stone, hearing her own heart-beat. Her hair's fallen over her bandanna into her face, it's sweaty and gross. Stupid summer Besaid weather. At least the air in this room's much cooler, compared to outside at least. Still. Focus. She notices the glass covering the stone is smooth and perfect, despite who-knows how long neglected – there must not be any dust in the room, just pyrefly death-motes.

The stone under the crystal looks colourless, not painted and lively as the others were, but as she tilts her head, either reflections of the hangings around the chamber or some kind of magic sends flickering iridescence over the body of the Fayth.

A woman with wings.

Rikku sits back on her knees, looking at the woman. It's like a picture that's too big and too eerie to process head on, you need the right perspective to see her through her shell of stone. That soft curve is an arm, peacefully holding her hand to her heart. That is her eye, catching a green glitter of light. She smiles, and a wing arches up behind her protectively on one side, and a long braided tail of hair curls round on the other.

She didn't mean to look so closely, but she feels like she's in a trance. She's suddenly not comfortable, (there's some thought rattling round in her head and it's spooking her), and her body seems heavy and forgotten, as if she's just waking up from a deep sleep. But she lifts her eyes from the picture in stone.

And Yuna's standing above it. In the air. Translucent.

"Wha-? Y- Yunie!"

_Yunie can't be the Fayth. She can't. _

"I'm sorry, Rikku."

Yuna-fayth's voice is as calm and sad as Yuna has ever sounded. It has that trapped, unhappy quality she used to have. On the Pilgrimage. Anger suddenly rages in Rikku's stomach and she pulls herself up to her feet from the floor, towards the spectre of her cousin, hands thrown out and eyes urgent.

"What did you do, Yuna!? Why?!"

Yuna shakes her head in a resigned way, like she knew Rikku would act this way but it couldn't be helped. Then the ex-summoner drops her eyes.

"When we stopped Sin, we made a lot of things better. Sending the Fayth of Zanarkand, bringing the Eternal Calm. But- I Sent the Fayth from the temples, too.

"The temples are all linked to the Farplane, remember. A summoner calls an Aeon from the Farplane, a Fayth is the link that allows that Call to be heard. But... we found out that it works in the other direction, too. When a- When a Summoner does a Sending, the souls of the dead pass down all the links the Summoner has made at the Temples, with the Fayth. And..."

Yuna's ghostly image pauses. Rikku is left to fill in the blanks: we can't call aeons from the Farplane, and the dead can't be called to it. Only dead people aren't summoned, they're-

"With no Fayth," she realises: "the dead can't be Sent."

"Yes"

Yuna looks unnaturally calm, and very, very sad. But if she didn't understand her cousin before, Rikku does now: after four long years, the Al Bhed knows exactly where the other woman's thought process has led her. She looks the ex-Summoner (-the Fayth, now-) in her eyes.

"It's not your _fault,_ Yuna. It's not."

Yuna shakes her head, implacable.

"I Sent the Fayth."

"But _they_ asked you to!"

All the helpless anger Rikku remembers from the Pilgrimage comes back, choking her with the tragedy of it all, and she starts crying. She feels like she was fifteen again.

"Why did you do this? It's not fair, Yunie. Haven't you done enough?"

"Rikku." Yuna sighs, smiling just a little bit. "Thankyou. Don't ever change, okay?"

Was Yuna crying? She was only half-there, the lights and pyreflies shining through her, so Rikku couldn't tell. But after a few seconds of heavy silence, the ex-summoner shifted in the air and her mismatched eyes turned purposeful.

"You have to listen to me now, though. The number of wild fiends has been increasing since the Calm, and to fix it, the temples and their links to the Farplane need to be rebuilt. They're drawn unwillingly here now, because they sense what we've done, and they need to be killed and Sent. It's not a good solution, but the Farplane at Guadosalam is a joint between the two worlds, not a_ gateway_ the way the Fayth are. You have to physically walk through the entrance in Guadosalam to pass over, and fiends won't do that by choice. So Spira needs summoners and Sendings to come back."

Rikku maybe half-understands, but it doesn't really matter so long as she nods. Yuna's decided this is true, and you'd have to be blind to miss the determination on her face, the rock-hard deep-rooted kind that had kept her going through the Pilgrimage despite having every reason not to. The difference between that and the bright effervescent enthusiasm she displays with Tidus and plans for the future is like night and day. Rikku isn't going to change this Yuna's mind.

So the Al Bhed just nods, mind rocked and not even nearly recovered from the shock of seeing her friend semi-transparent and kind of dead. Arguing with Yuna right now would hurt both of them and not change anything, because Yuna's decided to do this and even though Rikku wants to hug her cousin or hit her, bring her back, either way, she knows not to. There's nothing to say, anyway: all there is in her mind is immature: 'why you? why's it always your responsibility?'. Asking that would only make Yuna sigh and draw on her too-deep reserves of patience and calm and sad acceptance; Yuna doesn't know those answers.

Rikku deeply desperately doesn't want to do that, almost as much as she doesn't want to have to stand here and look at Yuna doing the right thing and be hurt by how the Happy Gullwing Carefree Yuna might well have gone forever. Gone. Can Yuna feel tears in her eyes as a Fayth, like Rikku has now, or is her body cold and sleeping and the Yuna-shaped piece of air in front of her just a trick to make visitors forget that the real High Summoner's been buried in glass and stone?

Rikku's suddenly terrified: maybe she isn't talking to the real Yuna. Maybe this voice is all that's left of her; just the calm determination and none of the joy and spirit and life of her.

"Yunie, where did Tidus go?" Tidus brings out all Yuna's caring.

"He's... faded. He can come back, but not yet." There had been emotions in Yuna's voice then, they'd been the subtle kind that Yuna used to keep hidden behind her Summoner mask of graceful dignity. She doesn't feel they ought to be on view, probably. But they're still there, at least.

But then Yuna becomes oblique and firm and gives commands: "To bring him back, I need you to go to Bevelle and find the Dragon-Fayth."

"Dragon-Fayth?"

"The Fayth from the Temple in Bevelle; you saw him before. He... it... is the one who anchored Tidus to this world. When we did this-" she gestured at the stone beneath her "-It disrupted the Fayth-connection between the worlds. Go to Bevelle, Rikku, and find out where Tidus has gone."

"You couldn't just ask?" '_We' did this?_

Yuna smiled, turning her head away and down a little, as if privately amused. The break in the conversation makes Rikku fidget again, she's shorter than the floating Yuna-ghost and looking up's made her neck hurt. Then Yuna starts talking again, and it's odd: it's like she's lost track of the conversation and she's starting it again. Her voice is weird.

"Go to Bevelle, and then go to Djose Temple. The presence of a Fayth is felt there. Rikku, thank-you. Good luck."

"Yunie?" Rikku asks, turning and looking up, but as Yuna steps forward and puts her arms around her, everything goes white and bright and overwhelming like it does when you're casting dangerous magic and there's a panicky second when the spell builds up too much inside you. She suddenly can't see and she stumbles and only just puts her hands down to catch herself before hitting the floor, and then those too fail and she's lying half curled up on the stone floor and shaking and trying not to black out.


End file.
